Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

One part of the responses to questions today by the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Conroy, was absolutely accurate. That is when he said, ‘We are a joke.’ Senator Conroy and, indeed, the whole of the current government are a joke—and, regarding this matter, many Australians now regret having laughed prior to the election.

Mr Deputy President, you will recall that the Labor Party promised to reduce grocery prices; you will recall that they promised to reduce petrol prices; yet we have grocery prices going through the roof and petrol prices at their highest level ever. In the telecommunications area, we were promised that construction of the new broadband network would commence by the end of 2008 and be finished by 2012. No serious commentator, no serious involvee in the broadband industry accepts or appreciates that this can possibly happen.

Labor made a promise; it gave a commitment that the $4.7 billion would be used for a fifty-fifty equity partnership. Those of us who were in the Senate last year will remember how Senator Conroy seemed fixated on the phrase ‘fibre to the node’. What do we find, after the Labor Party has been in power for seven months? All of those promises, like all of their other promises, are thrown out the door. As Senator Birmingham rightly says: according to the Labor Party, the technology these days does not matter anymore. We got quite sick of Senator Conroy, before the election, mouthing about fibre to the node. We suspected that he had no idea what it meant, but it sounded good. It was continually spoken about. Today the Labor Party seems to have gone right off that proposal and is asking to have a look at any proposals that might be put forward by possible bidders.

There is the fifty-fifty equity. As Senator Birmingham very cleverly pointed out in his question to the minister: if it is to be a fifty-fifty partnership, the $4.7 billion of the government’s half share means that the total cost will be no more than $9.4 billion. Even the most conservative commentator or the most conservative insider can now say that there is no prospect of the broadband highway being completed in the time stated and at a cost anywhere near that proposed.

Senator Conroy should now apologise for misleading the Australian public before the election and should admit to the timetable. He clearly knows that the dates he is now giving are impossible to achieve. It would be better for Senator Conroy at this early stage to concede that what he said in this regard before the election was just rhetoric and to give the Australian public some idea of when we might expect a decent broadband service in Australia.

The former minister, Senator Coonan, had a very definitive plan. She had done a great deal of work in forwarding a proposal that would have brought broadband and urgent immediate telecommunications to all parts of Australia. As someone who comes from a rural and regional area, I was delighted that the former government had set money aside and had a plan that would have got decent high-speed broadband to all parts of Australia.

The Labor Party are still in never-never land. They have no real idea of when the broadband network might be started, let alone finished. That means that those of us in rural and regional Australia, in particular, will be left to the mercies of the Labor Party, as we were all those years ago when the Labor government shut off the analog network without any replacement program in mind. You cannot trust the Labor Party with money; neither can you trust them with telecommunications.